Using a Samsung Super Fast Charging cable to charge batteries and controller for Mini 4 Pro or Mini 3 Pro?.

JimSteadman · Nov 5, 2023

Can a Samsung Super Fast Charging cable be used to charge batteries or controller for a Mini 4 Pro or a Mini 3 pro? It seems to take quite a while to charge both the batteries and controller on the provided cable. I have a Samsung Charger for simultaneous charging of 2 phones and a watch. When I used the cable from that apparatus on the drone battery charger the charging seems to go much faster. But will a faster chrage damage the batteries or the controller. There is a QR code on the back of the charger itself, but it is so small that I cannot successfully scan it or scan it.

GFields · Nov 5, 2023

JimSteadman said:
Can a Samsung Super Fast Charging cable be used to charge batteries or controller for a Mini 4 Pro or a Mini 3 pro? It seems to take quite a while to charge both the batteries and controller on the provided cable. I have a Samsung Charger for simultaneous charging of 2 phones and a watch. When I used the cable from that apparatus on the drone battery charger the charging seems to go much faster. But will a faster chrage damage the batteries or the controller. There is a QR code on the back of the charger itself, but it is so small that I cannot successfully scan it or scan it.

Usually the cause for slow charging is due to low wattage output from the charging brick.

JimSteadman · Nov 5, 2023

Thanks for the info. I was able to get the code on the back of the charger which led me to this additional info:

Product Information

The Samsung Micro USB-C Charger Adapter Adaptive Fast Charge with cable allows you to quickly charge your Samsung smartphone. Samsung Adaptive Fast Charge is Samsung's version of the fast charge protocol Quick Charge. This means that you can use this charger on all Android smartphones with Quick Charge. The only devices this charger doesn't charge optimally are those with Power Delivery, such as the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus. You can still charge them, but not at the highest speed.

Specifications:
* Color: Black
* Manufacturer: Samsung
* Manufacturer code: GH44-03023A
* Manufacturer title: ADAPTOR-EP-TA200
* Model code: EP-TA200EBE
* extra information: 9V-1.67A | 5V-2A | 15 Watt
* Suitable for: SM-A505F/DS Galaxy A50, SM-G970F Galaxy S10e, SM-G973F Galaxy S10, SM-G975F Galaxy S10 Plus

The manual for the M4P indicates that the regular batteries will be fully charged in 58 minutes in the DJI USB 30W USB Charger, But the Samsung charger is only 25W, so it seems like it should be safe. I do not want to damage a battery but I also want to get it done as quickly as possible.

slup · Nov 5, 2023

The power supply brick will always just provide what the Battery Management system in the Mini 4 Pro battery says it wants at any time during the charge cycle... up until the power supply can't provide more.

If you use a power supply with the ability to provide 10 000w... the Mini 4 Pro battery will be fine, this as it will only ask for max 30w.

JimSteadman · Nov 5, 2023

Thanks for the response. I am assuming it charges faster as it blinks much faster. That having been said, the specs say it only provides 25W, which is less than the 30W it can take.

Meta4 · Nov 6, 2023

JimSteadman said:
When I used the cable from that apparatus on the drone battery charger the charging seems to go much faster.

Surely it's the charger that would make things faster (if the battery equipment is compatible).
The cable wouldn't have anything to do with it?

3rdof5 · Nov 6, 2023

A Samsung Fast Charger (that outputs both 5v and 9v) will charge any mini 3 or 4 just fine, as well as the RC. It must be able to output 9 volts though.

EssenYVR · Nov 7, 2023

Meta4 said:
Surely it's the charger that would make things faster (if the battery equipment is compatible).
The cable wouldn't have anything to do with it?

USB has gotten a lot more complicated over the years.

The original USB standard was able to provide 7.5W of power (1.5 A at 5V), and USB-C up to 15W (3A at 5V). To improve charge times for modern devices, a new charging standard called USB Power Delivery (PD) was created that uses higher voltages.

In order to do this safely, the USB cables have to be capable of dealing with the higher voltages and currents. To make sure that's the case, PD cables have special circuitry built into the connectors so that the end nodes (charger and device being charged) can identify the cable as capable of these higher charging rates.

So the upshot is: in order to charge at the higher power levels, all three components (the device being charged, the charger, and the cable connecting them) need to comply with the USB PD standards.

Unfortunately, this adds yet another variant to the whole USB cable mess. We already had problems with cables that could only be used for charging but which did not pass data back and forth, which leads to people tearing their hair out wondering why they can't synch their phones or other devices. And now we have some cables that can be used for fast charging and others which can't, all with no obvious way to tell them apart.

I was super happy to discover that the DJI equipment shows you the charging rate by varying the speed at which the battery lights blink - the faster the blinks the faster the charge rate. So you have a visual way to see if your charger and cables are delivering a high charging speed or not.

I've bought a USB Power Meter so I can see how much power is being delivered to my various devices, and when I've verified that a cable can deliver more than 15W of power I mark it "PD" using a tie wrap label so I can tell which cables I can and can't use to get high charge rates.

Oh, and those charge-only cables? Those go right into the garbage.